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Research Highlights

On May 17, UMass Amherst’s brand new 36-foot-long, water-testing trailer was rolled out at the State House in Boston for lawmakers and officials to see, marvel at, and extol. The name of the revolutionary trailer lab is the “University of Massachusetts Amherst Mobile Water Innovation Laboratory,” which was funded with a $100,000 grant by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the New England Water Innovation Network. The trailer allows scientists to move around the state and conduct reliable water tests that can transform the way local...

Professors Qiangfei Xia and J. Joshua Yang of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst headed up a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team whose latest manuscript, entitled "Efficient and self-adaptive in-situ learning in multilayer memristor neural networks," has just been published in Nature Communications. As Xia and Yang summarized the findings in the manuscript, “This work proves that the memristor neural network is ready for...

Principal investigator Ashwin Ramasubramaniam of our Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department leads a joint US-Israel team that has just received a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Division Of Materials Research to promote inexpensive, large-scale fabrication of electronic and optical devices within single sheets of 2D materials. The research promises to make far-reaching impacts on computing, data storage, and consumer electronics.

Shannon Roberts of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and Eric Gonzales of the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department were two of the campus experts who spoke about autonomous vehicles at a May 29 “listening session” convened by the Governor’s Commission on the Future of Transportation and held in the UMass Amherst Cape Cod Lounge at the Student Union. Roberts spoke about “Human Factor Needs in an Autonomous Vehicle World,” while Gonzales focused on “Autonomous Vehicles for Ride Sharing.”

Professors Matthew Lackner and Erin Baker of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department published a very illuminating essay in The Conversation on May 15 about why the offshore wind energy industry will soon vastly expand and why Massachusetts is one of the states that is leading the way. Lackner and Baker said that market forces are helping the development of offshore wind energy, while states on the East Coast are preparing long-range plans to develop wind...

The project of Associate Professor Chul Park of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department was one of four UMass Amherst projects to receive $25,000 Technology Development Grants from UMass President Marty Meehan’s office. The name of Park’s project is “Promoting the co-op anaerobic digestion for communities in New England using the UMass Anaerobic Side-stream Reactor Process.” His project aims to implement a system to minimize the production of sludge—a byproduct generated from wastewater treatment—using anaerobic side-stream reactor treatment and anaerobic digestion.

Industrial Engineering Professor Shannon Roberts of the University of Massachusetts Amherst notes that some modern vehicles have more than 100 computing components containing over 10 million lines of code. However, most vehicles are not designed with cybersecurity in mind and, as a result, they are susceptible to cyberattacks. For example, a 2015 Jeep Cherokee cyberattack in St. Louis resulted in a recall of 1.4 million vehicles. Moreover, there are countless other scenarios in which vehicles can be hacked to trigger crashes. With all these perils in mind, the National Science Foundation...

The Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Offshore Wind Energy Program, led by the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the College of Engineering, invites the campus community to attend its annual student poster session on Thursday, April 26, from 5:00 till 7:00 p.m. in the Hadley Room, 10th Floor, Campus Center. See UMass Amherst News Office report »

The 21 posters this year represent an interdisciplinary look at the engineering...